Streetsblog San Francisco

As has become painfully apparent on Polk Street, there is a deeply-held belief among certain merchants that car parking is indispensable to their business — even if studies indicate that very few of their customers drive, and that removing parking spaces to implement safety improvements could actually draw more potential customers.

SF Small Business commissioner and former president Luke O'Brien. Image: SFGovTV

So it’s no surprise that when SFMTA officials came to the SF Small Business Commission to discuss its goals to make streets safer and manage parking demand, preserving parking spaces was pretty much the only priority voiced by commissioners.

But Luke O’Brien, the commission’s former president, topped everyone else — he wants to build more parking garages in San Francisco.

O’Brien told SFMTA Director Ed Reiskin that city policies like “transit-first,” which limit the number of new parking spaces in favor of encouraging walking, biking, and transit, “give rise to this feeling that a way of life is being imposed” upon those who would like to drive.

O’Brien didn’t suggest which productive real estate in built-out San Francisco might be sacrificed to construct new parking garages, which come at an average cost of $19,253 per parking space [PDF].

As Reiskin explained, rather than inducing more traffic by building more parking, the SFMTA is instead striving to manage demand for the existing parking supply using pricing strategies under SFPark. As part of that program, the SFMTA is lowering prices on city-owned garages, which have gone severely under-used, to help make them more attractive to drivers than street parking.

“I think our main focus is on being smarter about how we manage parking, rather than increasing the supply,” said Reiskin. “The streets are not getting wider, so for us to build more parking, that would enable more people to drive, which would ultimately have the impact of clogging the streets.”

As the Bay Guardian reported last year, two other commissioners have said O’Brien, a developer appointed to the commission by former Mayor Gavin Newsom, “has been especially aggressive in pushing his ideological agenda.”

O’Brien seemed perfectly fine with the fact that more parking would put more cars on the streets. “I’ve gotta agree with you, if you build more capacity, people generally use it,” he said.

A mob mentality ruled at a neighborhood meeting last night on safety improvements for Polk Street, where attendees booed any suggestion that removing car parking to make room for pedestrian and bicycle amenities might be worthwhile.

A few hundred attendees packed the Middle Polk Neighborhood Association meeting last night, where any suggestion to change the dangerous status quo was roundly booed. Photo: Aaron Bialick

Fact-based discussion was in short supply at the Middle Polk Neighborhood Association meeting. Instead, hyperbole and misinformation were the order of the day, spread by “Save Polk Street” flyers erroneously claiming that the SF Municipal Transportation Agency plans to remove all parking along a 20-block stretch of Polk.

While the SFMTA has engaged residents in a community-based planning process for Polk from the outset, project supporters were scarce last night. D3 Supervisor David Chiu, who usually talks a good game on street safety, has not taken a position on the project.

Dan Kowalski, who owns the furniture store Flipp, said it was “natural” for the reaction from merchants to go from “alarm to absolute panic” after seeing the SFMTA’s proposals to add protected bike lanes and more public space while removing, at the most, roughly half of Polk’s on-street parking, which makes up just 7 percent of the parking supply within a one-block range of the corridor.

Kowalski and other speakers dismissed evidence that the same kinds of street improvements proposed for Polk have improved safety and boosted business on other streets, even when parking is removed.

Merchants on Stockton Street in Chinatown have lauded the temporary bans on parking during the Lunar New Year. Parklets, bike lanes, Sunday Streets, and other streetscape upgrades that increase foot traffic are in high demand citywide. The sky hasn’t fallen in New York, either, where recent data shows that after a protected bike lane was installed on Ninth Avenue, local retail sales increased 49 percent, compared to a 3 percent increase throughout Manhattan. At the north end of Union Square, which saw a major expansion of pedestrian space, commercial vacancies have dropped 49 percent, at the same time that they have risen 5 percent borough-wide.

“We’ve looked at the statistics that people have presented to us, and they aren’t real. They’re proposing that our business will actually increase,” said Kowalski, eliciting laughter from the audience. “On paper, it might. But what we’ve seen in the real world, what we’ve seen in other cities, when they’ve tried some similar things, is that they’ve had some very negative reactions.”

To make his case, Kowalski claimed that “some of the same projects” have been tried and removed in Brooklyn and San Diego. A little research, however, shows that those cases had nothing to do with streetscape improvements on a business corridor.

In Brooklyn, the only case of a bike lane being removed was on a residential stretch of Bedford Avenue, where politically-influential leaders from the Hasidic community protested the scanty clothing of female riders. In San Diego, green paint on a suburban road was scrubbed off a bike lane merging zone because it failed to cause speeding drivers to yield to riders.

But Kowalski’s claims went unchallenged, and no one mentioned the evidence that merchants tend to wildly overestimate, like the survey on Columbus Avenue which found that just 14 percent of people arrived by car, and those people tended to spend less than people who arrived by other means.

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Image via SF Public Press

By the end of the month, Muni plans to roll out the first of 62 new low-floor hybrid buses, SF Municipal Transportation Agency Director Ed Reiskin said at a board of directors meeting last week.

Muni will receive 13 of the 40-foot-long buses and put one of them into service by April, he said. Then, starting in May, the agency will begin testing and rolling out 5 buses per week over three months.

As we reported in September, the SFMTA purchased 45 of the 2013 New Flyer buses, but Reiskin said the agency was able to add 17 more to the contract in late October [PDF] by getting in on a purchase “consortium” and obtaining more funds from the Federal Transit Administration and local Prop K sales taxes. The total cost of the contract was increased from $36.9 million to $48.7 million.

Reiskin noted that these are Muni’s first new buses since 2007, and that they should reduce the transit system’s notoriously high rate of breakdowns. “As you know, we have one of the oldest bus fleets in the nation,” he said. “This is a long time coming.”

Constructing raised, protected bike lanes on downtown Mission Street would cost more than building them on Market, according to SF Municipal Transportation Agency Director Ed Reiskin.

A possible vision for Market Street with a raised, protected bikeway.

The Mission bikeway proposal, which recently surfaced as an option to be studied in the repeatedly-delayed Better Market Street project, would entail abandoning long-sought bike safety improvements on Market, which is where bicycle riders naturally tend to travel. The Department of Public Works and the SFMTA have said the Mission option, which would also re-route Muni’s 14-Mission buses on to Market, would be simpler to engineer, allow the 14 to use Market’s wider bus lanes, and could include a “green wave” for bikes on Mission.

The proposal for protected bike lanes on Mission instead of Market. Images: Better Market Street

But even factoring in the cost of reconstructing Market Street’s granite curbs to build raised bike lanes, the Mission option is projected to be more expensive, Reiskin told the SF County Transportation Authority Board (comprised of the Board of Supervisors) at a hearing yesterday. Though the cost estimates for each option aren’t immediately available, Reiskin said that even if protected bikeways weren’t included at all, construction costs on Market Street would only be cut by an estimated 10 percent. The total cost of the project is estimated to be as high as $450 million, up from the $250 million figure provided last year.

Supervisor Scott Wiener, who, along with Supervisor John Avalos, called for hearings to scrutinize the Mission bikeway proposal and project delays, noted that “ten percent is not a dramatic increase,” and that debates about whether or not to build a protected bikeway on Market should focus on policy outcomes, not cost.

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In Chicago, a new two-way, parking-protected bike lane is being constructed on downtown Dearborn Street, four months after it was announced. Photo: trapgosh/Flickr

Bicycling in San Francisco is getting better since the bicycle injunction was lifted in 2010, and concrete progress on projects like the critical Fell and Oak Street bikeway is very encouraging. But this week also made bicyclists in SF painfully aware that as the SF Municipal Transportation Agency gets closer to completing the projects in its Bike Plan, it will need to elevate its game to keep up with the nation’s leading cities. The upcoming release of the SFMTA’s Bicycle Strategy is a can’t-miss opportunity to pick up the pace.

The latest reminder that SF risks falling far behind the leading American cities came when bike advocates around the country got a look at Chicago’s new, protected two-way bike lane on downtown Dearborn Street — providing a 1.2-mile connection to another protected lane on Kinzie Street. It’s part of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s commitment to building 100 miles of protected lanes within his first four years of office. And it stands in contrast to the much slower roll-out of protected bike lanes, so far, under SF Mayor Ed Lee.

The SFMTA is planning a handful of similar projects on streets like Market, Second, and Polk, and getting improvements like that into the pipeline is hugely important. Still, those improvements are several years off from construction, as part of larger street makeovers. Meanwhile, cities like Chicago and New York are making much more rapid progress toward building continuous protected bike routes into their major job centers.

San Francisco could catch up, depending on the commitments the SFMTA makes in its upcoming Bicycle Strategy, which planners are expected to brief the agency’s board on in January. SFMTA staff says the strategy will lay out a network of priority routes for bike improvements that will help attain the city’s official goal of increasing bicycling’s share of all trips to 20 percent by 2020.

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Five city transportation chiefs -- Phildelphia's Rina Cutler, Chicago's Gabe Klein, NYC's Janette Sadik-Khan, San Francisco's Ed Reiskin, and Boston's Tom Tinlin -- shared their perspectives today on how cities have innovated by necessity.

The leaders of the nation’s big city transportation agencies have formed a tight-knit circle, brought together by the National Association of City Transportation Officials to share best practices, and yes, battle scars.

As NACTO’s first ever national conference drew to a close today, transportation chiefs from Boston, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Chicago and New York all talked about the progress their cities have made and shared their frustration at the lack of attention to cities and transportation in the state and national political arenas.

NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg set the tone by blasting the state government in his introductory remarks. “Our economy is dependent on transportation,” he said. “But our state refused to give us money for a new subway line, so we said ‘screw you’ and took city taxpayer money to extend a subway line.”

NYC Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan put it even more starkly. She said that instead of the old New Yorker cartoon, a New Yorker’s view of the world, in which the map falls off dramatically after the Hudson River, “Washington’s view of the world is made up of Iowa, Ohio and lots of highways. And some dollar signs on the map where New York and Los Angeles are.”

Despite the lack of attention from Congress and the presidential contenders, Sadik-Khan explained that transportation innovations at the city level can cumulatively affect the nation’s economy, echoing yesterday’s plenary speaker Bruce Katz of the Brookings Institution. “You’ve got two-thirds of Americans living in top 100 metropolitan areas, where three-quarters of US GDP is generated,” Sadik-Khan said. “As cities go, so goes the nation. Yet there is no mention of cities in presidential debates.” Added San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency Director Ed Reiskin, “There was no mention at all of transportation in any of the debates.”

Given the progress that cities across the country are making on transportation reform, the question arises: How much more can cities do without the active support of Washington and state governments?

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Since Scott Wiener took office as District 8 supervisor, he’s stood out as a progressive transportation advocate at City Hall, holding the SFMTA accountable for improving service for Muni riders, making the streets safer for pedestrians, and more.

Supervisor Wiener's opposition to Sunday parking metering doesn't jibe with his stance as a transit advocate. Photo: Dennis Hearne Photography

So it was disappointing to hear him say he’s against the SFMTA’s long-overdue proposal to enforce parking meters on Sunday.

At a Board of Supervisors Budget and Finance Committee meeting last Thursday, Wiener told SFMTA Director Ed Reiskin that although he “completely understands the policy rationale for it in theory,” he’s “not a fan of the Sunday meters.”

“Even though the patterns have changed in the last 50 years in terms of activity on Sunday, I also know that patterns have developed taking into account that there are no meters on Sunday,” said Wiener. “I think that’s the reason we’ve seen the reaction that we’ve seen.”

Sunday metering, he added, “is something that has a lot of impacts on a lot of people throughout the city.”

That’s for sure. Every Sunday and every evening after 6 p.m., when metered spots fill up with motorists taking advantage of free parking, scores of drivers opt to cruise or park illegally. That means more drivers distractedly searching for spots, more double-parked cars delaying Muni and endangering bicycle riders, more unnecessary air pollution and wear-and-tear on the city’s already-broken pavement, and businesses hurt by a lack of parking turnover.

If Wiener wants to see the “theory” in practice, he can visit Los Angeles, Old Pasadena, Miami Beach, or Portland, where meters are already in effect on Sundays.

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The SFMTA unveiled its proposed two-year budget today, and it includes extending car parking meter hours to Sundays between 12 p.m. and 6 p.m., but not during evenings. On those afternoons, the proposal promises to curb the congestion that results from drivers cruising for free parking when it’s in high demand. The measure is one of many budget gap-closing components in a plan that avoids raising transit fares.

Photo: goincase/Flickr

SFMTA Director of Transportation Ed Reiskin said parking meters wouldn’t run on Sunday mornings because there isn’t enough demand for commercial parking spaces at those times. When asked if church leaders had persuaded the agency not to charge for parking in the morning, he claimed the hours were only chosen to reflect commercial demand.

“The most concerns about Sunday mornings was that [they] start later than Saturdays, and it’s a little bit of a different business model, so we felt like this was the right approach,” said Reiskin. He also said complaints about church members needing to leave Sunday sermons to pay meters, which Interfaith Council member Rev. James Delange voiced to the SFMTA Board earlier this month, have largely died down because time limits would be three to four hours long, and many churches don’t even have metered parking.

Reiskin also said that Mayor Ed Lee and the Board of Supervisors seem more receptive to extending meter hours than the last time around. “I’ve been working on educating folks at City Hall as to the policy rationale and operating benefit of it,” he said. “I think when you just throw something out there, you know — ‘Do you like more taxes? Do you want to pay more for something?’ — everybody, of course, is going to say no.”

Running meters past 6 p.m., however, has drawn more resistance from car commuters who want to park for free after arriving home from work, said Reiskin. But he conceded that there is “an equally compelling argument” for pricing parking during the evening as there is on Sundays, and that “most of the cities across the country” price parking as late as 11 p.m. He also admitted that not metering high-demand parking in the evenings, which often forces drivers to circle for spots and slow down Muni, goes against the city’s transit-first policy.

Still, there’s cause for optimism that the days of evening parking dysfunction might be numbered. Reiskin said some businesses have been asking for evening meter hours, and that the SFMTA may still “pilot” evening meters in some districts “in the next year or two.”

“We’re trying not to do too much at once,” he said. “It was really, frankly, just a pragmatic decision, listening to the feedback we were getting. We’ll do a little bit more due diligence on the evening side before considering really jumping fully into it.”

The budget would also add 500 to 1,000 parking meters throughout business districts where parking is in high demand.

The budget goes to the SFMTA Board of Directors next Tuesday for approval.

SFMTA Director of Transportation Ed Reiskin has laid off “roughly a dozen” executive staff members at the agency, according to a letter sent to staff today provided by spokesperson Paul Rose. Rose said the agency is not releasing any names yet.

In the letter, Reiskin says the move is intended to reduce the agency’s budget deficit:

Photo: SFBC/Flickr

Colleagues:

I’m writing to give you a brief budget update.  As we’ve been focusing on developing a balanced budget for the next two fiscal years, FY 12-13 and FY 13-14, for the MTA Board’s consideration next month, we’ve also been developing means of closing our current – FY 11-12 – budget shortfall.  We are currently projected to spend nearly $30 million more than we’ve budgeted and what our revenues can support.  We cannot end the fiscal year with expenditures exceeding revenues, so we need to take corrective steps now to ensure we end the year balanced.

To that end, I’m initiating a number of actions to reduce expenditures between now and the end of the fiscal year.  These actions include freezing certain non-personnel expenses (contracts, materials), unencumbering funds for certain purchases that will not be completed this fiscal year, reducing overtime expenditures, and eliminating management positions.

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